Eating Animals

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Animal
Before visiting any farms, I spent more than a year wading through literature about eating animals: histories of agriculture, industry and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) materials, activist pamphlets, relevant philosophical works, and the numerous existing books about food that touch on the subject of meat. I frequently found myself confused. Sometimes my disorientation was the result of the slipperiness of terms like suffering, joy, and cruelty. Sometimes it seemed to be a deliberate effect. Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. Some words, like veal, help us forget what we are actually talking about. Some, like free-range, can mislead those whose consciences seek clarification. Some, like happy, mean the opposite of what they would seem. And some, like natural, mean next to nothing. Nothing could seem more “natural” than the boundary between humans and animals (see: species barrier). It happens, though, that not all cultures even have the category animal or any equivalent word in their vocabulary—the Bible, for example, lacks any word that parallels the English animal. Even by the dictionary definition, humans both are and are not animals. In the first sense, humans are members of the animal kingdom. But more often, we casually use the word animal to signify all creatures—from orangutan to dog to shrimp—except humans. Within a culture, even within a family, people have their own understandings of what an animal is. Within each of us there are probably several different understandings.

What is an animal? Anthropologist Tim Ingold posed the question to a diverse group of scholars from the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, biology, psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. It proved impossible for them to reach a consensus on the meaning of the word. Tellingly, though, there were two important points of agreement: “First, that there is a strong emotional undercurrent to our ideas about animality; and, second, that to subject these ideas to critical scrutiny is to expose highly sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our own humanity.” To ask “What is an animal?”—or, I would add, to read a child a story about a dog or to support animal rights—is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask, “What is a human?”

Anthropocentrism
The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives. Read More

In An Inconvenient Truth, both the book and the documentary film, Al Gore vividly presented the evidence for man-made climate change, dramatizing both the science and the scope of the threat for a broad audience. Now, in Our Choice, Gore returns to lay out a plan to solve the crisis. Firmly convinced that we have “at our fingertips” the technologies we need to save the planet and at the same time creating a new era of broadly shared (and sustainable) prosperity, Gore gathers the the most effective solutions that are available now–or will be soon– and that will overcome the greatest challenge our world faces. Beautifully illustrated with gorgeous photos and full-color charts and diagrams, Our Choice is also a one-stop resource for citizens who want to do their part to help but don’t know how. As Gore writes in the introduction to this landmark book, “We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we can make the choice to solve it, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed.” Below is an excerpt from Our Choice.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

By Al Gore

As a boy growing up during the summers on my family’s farm in Tennessee, I learned from my father how to recognize the richest and most productive soil: in a word, it’s black. It’s also porous and moist. But it was not until much later in my life that I learned the reason fertile soil is black: it’s the carbon.

The soils of the earth contain between three and four and a half times as much carbon—just in the first few feet—as do the plants and trees, and more than twice as much as is currently in the atmosphere. With improved agricultural and land management practices, we can significantly increase the amount of CO2 that is pulled from the atmosphere by vegetation and left sequestered in the soil, while enhancing agricultural productivity and food security—and restoring degraded lands—at the same time. As with other climate solutions, however, the success of this promising strategy depends upon large-scale changes in long-established patterns.

When my father was a young man, the greatest threat to the productivity of the land in America was soil erosion. Farmers and landowners in his generation were enlisted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a nationwide struggle to stop the soil erosion that had led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and had left many farms cut with deep gullies, through which the best soils for agriculture were washed away. To this day, I remember the lessons he taught me. For example, when walking across the farm, keep an eye out for the first hint of erosion; stop the beginning of a gulley before it can start to deepen. Read More

What it means to be “religious” is undergoing a major shift. Increasingly, people of faith are shunning dogma in favor of values, and formal, institutional religion in favor of “spirituality.” So argues Harvey Cox, emeritus professor of Divinity at Harvard and one of the most influential theologians of the past four decades. Cox’s new book, The Future of Faith, interprets anew the history and future of religion, and finds a falling away of “belief” and a corresponding ascendancy of “faith,” based in community, social justice, and spiritual experience. Below is an excerpt:

The Future of Faith

By Harvey Cox

From Chapter 1

An Age of the Spirit

The Sacred in the Secular?

What does the future hold for religion, and for Christianity in particular? At the beginning of the new millennium three qualities mark the world’s spiritual profile, all tracing trajectories that will reach into the coming decades. The first is the unanticipated resurgence of religion in both public and private life around the globe. The second is that fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying. But the third and most important, though often unnoticed, is a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.

The resurgence of religion was not foreseen. On the contrary, not many decades ago thoughtful writers were confidently predicting its imminent demise. Science, literacy, and more education would soon dispel the miasma of superstition and obscurantism. Religion would either disappear completely or survive in family rituals, quaint folk festivals, and exotic references in literature, art, and music. Religion, we were assured, would certainly never again sway politics or shape culture. But the soothsayers were wrong. Instead of disappearing, religion—for good or ill—is now exhibiting new vitality all around the world and making its weight widely felt in the corridors of power.

Many observers mistakenly confuse this resurgence of religion with “fundamentalism,” but the two are not the same. Fundamentalism is dying. Arguments still rage about whether the Christian Right in America is fatally divided or sullenly quiescent. Debates boil about whether the dwindling support for radical movements in Islam is temporary or permanent. But as the twenty-first century unfolds, the larger picture is clear. Read More

What a life Harold Evans has had! And what a career! From shoe-leather reporting for a weekly newspaper in a Lancashire mill town, to the editorship of the Sunday Times, where he redefined investigative journalism, broke story after story, sought and won redress for victims of injustice, and got laws changed (for the better), leaving an indelible mark on British society; then to New York, where as a stunningly successful book publisher he published a record number of bestsellers and found the time to write a few himself. In 2001, British journalists voted him the greatest all-time British newspaper editor, and three years later Queen Elizabeth II made him a knight. Evans’s new book, a memoir, is My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times. In it Evans tells the amazing story of his life and career and, along the way, demonstrates what journalism at its best can be. Below is an excerpt:

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

By Harold Evans

Chapter 1

Grains of Truth

The most exciting sound in the world for me as a boy was the slow whoosh-whoosh of the big steam engine leaving Manchester Exchange station for Rhyl in North Wales. Every year as summer neared I counted the days to when the whole family—six of us then—would escape the bleakness of northern winters, taking the train for a week at the seaside, buckets and spades in hand.

I was nearly twelve the summer I saw the bodies of the soldiers scattered about the sands.

The soldiers were so still, their clothing so torn, their faces so pale, they looked as if they had died where they fell. And yet they had escaped death, unlike thousands of their comrades left on the battlegrounds of northern France; thousands more were on their way to years in German internment camps. The men I saw were the lucky ones, a few hundred of the 198, 229 of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) who just days before in May-June 1940 had fought their way to Dunkirk. Twenty-four hours before we saw them, they had been on that other beach, being hammed from the air by Stuka dive-bombers, strafed by the machine guns of Messerschmitts, rescue ships ablaze offshore, and every hour the German panzers closing the ring. They were a forlorn group, unshaven, some in remnants of uniforms, some in makeshift outfits of pajamas and sweaters, not a hat between them, lying apart from the rows of deck chairs and the Punch-and-Judy show and the pier and the ice-cream stands. Most of the men who were evacuated had been sent to bases and hospitals in the south of England, but several thousand had been put on trains to seaside resorts in North Wales, where there were army camps and spare beds in the boardinghouses. The bulk of the men sprawled on the Rhyl beach were members of the Royal Corps of Signals attached to artillery regiments; some sixty-four officers and twenty-five hundred other ranks had been sent to the Second Signal Training Center at Prestatyn, which shared six miles of sand with Rhyl. Read More

Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes the Comment piece in the New Yorker, is one of the most respected political commentators around. In his new book ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era, he charts the rise and triumph of Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, bringing to the task his customary wit, insight, and feel for political history, as well as his incomparably limpid prose style. Here’s an excerpt:

¡Obámanos!: The Rise of a New Political Party

By Hendrik Hertzberg

From the Introduction

My Barack Obama

The presidential election that put Barack Obama in the White House has been variously called the most important, the most exciting, the most surprising, the most significant, the most consequential, and the most expensive in the modern history of the United States. The most expensive it certainly was, as was the one before and the one before that. What about the rest?

I’ve been counting, and it turns out that this presidential election was the fifteenth since I started paying attention. The fifteenth! More than one-quarter of all the fifty-six presidential elections in all of American history! And I’ve been a participant of sorts in every single one of them, beginning as a nine-year-old fourth grader in 1952 (when I “helped” my mother stuff envelopes and pass out buttons at a storefront Stevenson headquarters in our bucolically Republican suburban village) and then, every four years since, as a volunteer, a reporter, a speechwriter, or a purveyor of observation and opinion. I can honestly say that this one—the campaign and election of 2007 and 2008—was, whatever its historical importance and the rest, the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever experienced. Also, in the end, the most satisfying.

I cast my first vote in 1964, for Lyndon Johnson, and have voted for every Democratic nominee since. It’s never been a difficult call—not even in 1968, when, like a lot of people my age (I was in the Navy at the time, but stationed in lower Manhattan and spending evenings doing dogwork at Bobby Kennedy’s midtown headquarters), I hated the Vietnam War and loved R.F.K. I looked upon Hubert Humphrey with a mixture of contempt and pity, but come November I voted for him anyway; I felt sure there was still a good heart under all that cringing, and I thought he’d probably make a decent president. Also, remember his Republican opponent. Read More

David Plouffe managed one of the most original and successful presidential campaigns in American history, one that vaulted a little-known African-American with limited political experience to the White House, overcoming Democratic political royalty (Hillary Clinton), and a bona fide Republican war hero (John McCain) along the way. The Audacity to Win is the riveting inside story of how the Obama campaign pulled it off. Here’s an excerpt:

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

By David Plouffe

What surprised me at [our first meeting to discuss the vice presidency] was that Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than Ax and I had realized. He said if his central criterion measured who could be the best VP, she had to be included in that list. She was competent, could help in Congress, would have international bona fides and had been through this before, albeit in a different role. He wanted to continue discussing her as we moved forward. We met again a couple of weeks later in mid-June and winnowed the list down to about 10 names.

At our next meeting, we narrowed the list down to six. Barack continued to be intrigued by Hillary. “I still think Hillary has a lot of what I am looking for in a VP,” he said to us. “Smarts, discipline, steadfastness. I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”

Neither Ax nor I were fans of the Hillary option. We saw her obvious strengths, but we thought there were too many complications, both pre-election and post-election, should we be so fortunate as to win. Still, we were very careful not to object too forcefully. This needed to be his call. Read More

Remember searching the web before Google? No, me neither — at least I try not to. The company that today shapes our online lives more than any other got its start, back in 1998, by building a search engine that was smarter, faster, better than the rest. The knowing words on everyone’s lips at the time, as I recall, were “OK, great. But how’s it going to make money?” Well, now we know — Google would make money by expanding beyond search to “own” the information space in the information age. In Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta tells how the company that became a verb came to be: how (and how!) it grew: what its rise and dominance means for traditional media companies (nothing good); and where it’s headed next (in short, everywhere). Here’s an excerpt:

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

By Ken Auletta

Preface

The world has been Googled. We don’t search for information, we “Google” it. Type a question in the Google search box, as do more than 70 percent of all searchers worldwide, and in about a half second answers appear. Want to find an episode of Charlie Rose you missed, or a funny video made by some guy of his three-year-old daughter’s brilliant ninety-second synopsis of Star Wars: Episode IV? Google’s YouTube, with ninety million unique visitors in March 2009—two-thirds of all Web video traffic—has it. Want to place an online ad? Google’s DoubleClick is the foremost digital advertising services company. Google’s advertising revenues—more than twenty billion dollars a year—account for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online. In turn, Google pumps ad dollars into tens of thousands of Web sites, bringing both traffic and commerce to them. Want to read a newspaper or magazine story from anywhere in the world? Google News aggregates twenty-five thousand news sites daily. Looking for an out-of-print book or a scholarly journal? Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, “makes information available. Google makes information accessible.”

Google’s uncorporate slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more fear. There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google. Today, Google’s software initiatives encroach on every media industry, from telephone to television to advertising to newspapers to magazines to book publishers to Hollywood studios to digital companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, or eBay. For companies built on owning and selling or distributing that information, Google can be perceived as the new “Evil Empire.”

Google is run by engineers, and engineers are people who ask why: Why must we do things the way they’ve always been done? Why shouldn’t all the books ever published be digitized? Why shouldn’t we be able to read any newspaper or magazine online? Why can’t we watch television for free on our computers? Why can’t we make copies of our music or DVDs and share them with friends? Why can’t advertising be targeted and sold without paying fat fees to the media middleman? Why can’t we make phone calls more cheaply? Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers. They are scientists, always seeking new answers. They seek a construct, a formula, an algorithm that both graphs and predicts behavior. They naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data. Of course, Wall Street’s faith in such mathematical models for derivatives helped cripple the American economy. Naivete and passion make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or for ill. Google fervently believes it has a mission. “Our goal is to change the world,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told me. Making money, he continued, “is a technology to pay for it.” Read More

The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America

By Jonathan Tasini

Highway Robbery

The United States of America has just lived through the greatest looting of money in its history, a vast robbery that began in the late 1970s and has stretched to the present day. The perpetrators of this grand robbery didn’t just steal a few possessions, or a little bit of cash. Instead, they drained the economy of trillions of dollars, in the process skulking off with a vast fortune that defied imagination while leaving millions of people without jobs, in poverty or without their life savings.

It wasn’t a Willie Sutton kind of robbery, with guns drawn and a slip of paper passed to a bank teller. Sutton, you may recall, was a notorious bank robber who lives on in the public imagination because of a one-sentence answer he gave to explain his particular strategy of making money. When asked why he robbed banks, he supposedly replied (“supposedly” because he later denied ever uttering this memorable phrase), “Because that’s where the money is.” Since Willie was usually well-armed when he committed his crimes, his actions fit well with the classic definition of a robbery, which Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary tells us is “larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat.”

No, the robbery I am speaking about was pulled off without a single bullet being fired, and was, for the most part, perfectly legal (though many of the perpetrators actions spilled over into illegality). It was actually more like highway robbery, which Merriam-Webster’s defines as “excessive profit or advantage derived from a business transaction.” You have probably heard of some of the people involved in this highway robbery—Bernard Ebbers, John Rigas, Dennis Kozlowski, Edward Whitacre, Douglas Conant, John Thain, Jeffrey Kindler and David Farr, to name but a few. What do these people all have in common? They are, or were, corporate CEOs. Read More

As noted yesterday, Green Metropolis, by New Yorker writer David Owen, contends that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon or Snowmass, Colorado, or someplace in Vermont; it’s New York City. Skeptical? You might be less so after you read this excerpt.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

By David Owen

From Chapter 1

More Like Manhattan

The history of civilization is a chronicle of destruction: people arrive, eat anything slow enough to catch, supplant indigenous flora with species bred for exploitation, burn whatever can be burned, and move on or spread out. No sensitive modern human can contemplate that history without a shudder. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our recklessness, as well as signs that our destructive reach is growing. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is no longer the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, 175 miles away. Tap water in metropolitan Washington, D.C., has been found to contain trace amounts of caffeine, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, two antibiotics, an anticonvulsive drug used to treat seizures and bipolar disorder, and the antibacterial compound triclocarban, which is an ingredient of household soaps and cleaning agents. Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven’t ruined already, to conserve what we haven’t used up, to restore as much as possible of what we’ve destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children’s lifetimes and beyond.

To the great majority of Americans who share these concerns, densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization—the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars—and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than any other American region of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green. Read More

Part One, Flights

Chapter One

Bujumbura-NewYork, May 1994

On the outskirts of the capital, Bujumbura, there is a small international airport. It has a modern terminal with intricate roofs and domed metal structures that resemble astronomical observatories. It is the kind of terminal that seems designed to say that here you leave the past behind, the future has arrived, behold the wonders of aviation. But in Burundi in 1994, for the lucky few with tickets, an airplane was just the fastest, safest way out. It was flight.

In the spring of that year, violence and chaos governed Burundi. To the west, the hills above Bujumbura were burning. Smoke seemed to be pouring off the hills, as the winds of mid-May carried the plumes of smoke downward in undulating sheets, in the general direction of the airport. A large passenger jet was parked on the tarmac, and a disordered crowd was heading toward it in sweaty haste. Deo felt as if he were being carried by the crowd, immersed in an unfamiliar river. The faces around him were mostly white, and though many were black or brown, there was no one whom he recognized, and so far as he could tell there were no country people. As a little boy, he had crouched behind rocks or under trees the first times he’d seen airplanes passing overhead. He had never been so close to a plane before. Except for buildings in the capital, this was the largest man-made thing he’d ever seen. He mounted the staircase quickly. Only when he had entered the plane did he let himself look back, staring from inside the doorway as if from a hiding place again.   In Deo’s mind, there was danger everywhere. If his heightenedsense of drama was an inborn trait, it had certainly been nourished. For months every situation had in fact been dangerous. Climbing the stairs a moment before, he had imagined a voice in his head telling him not to leave. But now he stared at the hills and he imagined that everything in Burundi was burning. Burundi had become hell. He finally turned away, and stepped inside. In front of him were cushioned chairs with clean white cloths draped over their backs, chairs in perfect rows with little windows on the ends. This was the most nicely appointed room he’d ever seen. It looked like paradise compared to everything outside. If it was real, it couldn’t last.

The plane was packed, but he felt entirely alone. He had a seat by a window. Something told him not to look out, and something told him to look. He did both. His hands were shaking. He felt he was about to vomit. Everyone had heard stories of planes being shot down, not only the Rwandan president’s plane back in April but others as well. He was waiting for this to happen after the plane took off. For several long minutes, whenever he glanced out the window all he saw was smoke. When the air cleared and he could see the landscape below, he realized that they must already have crossed the Akanyaru River, which meant they had left Burundi and were now above Rwanda. He had crossed a lot of the land down there on foot. It wasn’t all that small. To see it transformed into a tiny piece of time and space-this could only happen in a dream.

Read More